Opinion: Great photos take a lot of work, attention to detail
Published 9:30 am Friday, April 22, 2016
Someone asked me last week what I look for when I take a photo for the paper. Considering we’re in the final days of our annual reader photo contest — entries due this Friday — it was timely and relevant. It was also something I should have talked about weeks ago.
Note, I don’t consider myself a great photographer, and I could easily use up all my fingers and toes listing people who are. If I’m anywhere on their spectrum, I’d hope it’s at the “adequate” level.
That said, I have had a few things drummed into my head about newspaper photography specifically — things like how to spot color and contrast problems that will make print reproduction difficult, but also basics like posing subjects on blank backgrounds so they don’t end up with trees growing out of their heads or neon EXIT signs floating above them. You’d be amazed at how hard that is to do.
The next time you’re at a social gathering and photos are taken, I challenge you to count the Exit signs that end up in your photos.
After that, the challenge is to get rid of them, not with selective cropping in Photoshop, but with the way you use your camera.
How then, to take better photos? I can boil it down for you in two easy-to-say but hard-to-follow phrases, the things that stuck with me from years of photo workshops: Fill the frame; and Details, details, details.
Filling the frame is about taking the photo you see in your mind, not the one that you can crop later in Photoshop. It means getting close to your subjects, about half the distance you’d normally be from them. The result is usually a high-quality image that doesn’t need cropping and can still be tweaked in Photoshop, if you choose. But I’ll bet you won’t really want to.
Details can be difficult, but luckily, there are some you can skip. There’s a complicated relationship between shutter speeds, f-stops and “film” speeds in cameras and an equally complicated data set in photo editing tools. Modern cameras let you bypass those things that don’t interest you.
Details make or break photographs. The tree coming out of someone’s head, the one person not looking at the camera in a group of people, the awkward expression on a speaker’s face captured mid-sentence, those are the things that alter a photograph forever from the one the photographer intended to make.
Details, finally, are how we tell stories. Thousands of people come to the Festival at Mount Si each year, but a photo of the crowd lining the parade route doesn’t capture the mood nearly as well as one of the children scrambling to gather candy handed out from the passing floats.
